SAN JUAN, P.R. — With its navigation lights off, the 35-foot speedboat raced north toward Puerto Rico one night this month, its two large engines at full throttle. Above, a Coast Guard helicopter chased it and then let loose a few warning shots. But the boat roared ahead. Then, thwack, the crew on the copter shot out one of engines.

By dawn, the frenzied scramble had come to an end and 1,280 kilograms of cocaine — worth about $37 million on the street — were in federal hands, much of it scooped from the Caribbean Sea, where the smugglers had tossed the bales. An interagency task force of federal law enforcement, the Coast Guard and the Puerto Rico Police Department confiscated the drugs and arrested two men from the Dominican Republic. A third man had jumped overboard and was never found.

It was one in a string of increasingly common high-profile drug hauls and arrests playing out in and around Puerto Rico and nearby Caribbean islands, a trail mythologized in the cocaine cowboy era of the 1980s, when a seemingly endless supply of drugs flowed from this region into Miami. Seizures of cocaine, the most profitable drug for smugglers, have nearly quadrupled here since 2011. Over the past three years, the seizures of cocaine headed for the United States from South America have risen by as much as 20 percent, according to federal drug enforcement officials.

About the blog

For the past year, readers have come to the State You're In pages in our monthly Floridian magazine to feast on our facts, to lap up our lyrics, to tarry with our Time Capsule. And then they were done, and there was nothing to do but wait for the next month. Didn't seem right that we were apart for so long. So we on the SYI desk have decided to go digital. Written by Michael Kruse, it will provide you a constant supply of signature State You're In news and commentary. Because we were meant to be together. Every day.